Family Drama 4 E-Book Bundle (142 page)

Perhaps these pills would do the trick for a while, but she didn’t want Joe worried. He’d fuss and make her go to bed. If war was coming she would do her bit whatever the consequences.

Two days later there was a letter from Mirren saying she was coming home at the end of term for the duration. ‘You’ll need me when the farm lads get called up. Teaching can wait, Gran.’

Adey wept to herself with relief at the news. Miriam was a good lass, like her mother at that age, the runaway daughter who’d never got a chance to prove them wrong.

How mysterious are the ways of Providence in giving us a second chance, she sighed.

Reuben Yewell whistled to himself as he set about filling the gap in the wall. There was no other life for him from now on. He had left Leeds without a backward glance. This was the life. He loved setting out his stones, hand and eye working together in the ancient art of knowing which stone to place where, finding the exact one or dressing
another with a chisel to fit into the shape. It was like a giant jigsaw puzzle. They never went back the way they had fallen.

From the top field he got a grand view of the dale. Its greenness never tired his eye. It was hard work for little more than his keep but he was where he wanted to be at long last.

Walling couldn’t be skimped if it was to last for centuries to come; his wall reshaped and strengthened, one upon two, two upon one in the old pattern, with big through stones placed evenly as the wall rose and narrowed off. A good wall could see them all out. If only other things in life could be so certain.

Uncle Tom trusted him with jobs, especially with sheep. He trusted him over Jack because he sensed that Yewell instinct in him. He might be a plodder but when he walked the fields he did it with care and a sharp eye. Tom had shown him how to spot a ewe in trouble, to listen to see if she’d lambed and was making the right noise, pointed out the signs of weakness and strength in a new-born lamb, how to skin a dead one and mother on an orphan.

Grandpa Joe pointed out how weather came in mostly from the west, how to spot rain clouds, haze and sun dogs, how the wind changing direction was important. There was so much to learn and now that war was coming, he knew he’d made the right choice in helping them out.

What would happen to Cragside if all the men
left? Someone had to keep the nation fed and the land safe. Bert had gone into the RAF, Jack was in the army, but he knew his job was right here. Mirren was at college.

He was glad Jack was off. He always made him feel a bit of a clodhopper. Jack had never been keen on farming. He cut corners and had no feel for the animals. Mirren was more like him. She took time to do things properly. She was a nature girl, interested in flowers and birds and knew the Latin names of everything. He’d been hopeless at Latin.

He’d lived for the weekends and school holidays to come and help out at Cragside for years. Now he had a chance to pay them back.

He’d learned to fish down by the river and walked the paths with the river warden, knew the lie of the land and once took Jack out to poach a salmon from the river, which he’d then not had the nerve to sell on. Jack had whisked it down to the pub and pocketed the cash.

Jack bought a motor bike and offered to teach him to drive but he preferred slower things. He was a good horseman now.

‘Boring old Ben,’ Jack teased as they eyed up all the girls at the Young Farmers’ dance. Jack got the best partners in Windebank: the glamour girls with painted faces and long nails, who loved riding pillion on his bike.

Mirren’s girl friends, Lorna and Hilda and Aly,
were grammar school girls and he was wary of them, a bookish, giggling gang and always whispering. It was best to keep out of their way.

He and Mirren were offcomers, townies on the surface, but both of them now were country through and through. His dad had smiled and told him to go and do his war service in the dale. ‘At least we’ll know one of you is safe,’ he quipped, making out it was an easy option. Ben almost went the opposite way with Bert for a while but the pull of the land was stronger than any other service. His ancestors might have been on the muster roll for Flodden in 1513 but he was going to stay put and put his back into the war effort. He was going to keep the nation fed.

7

In the weeks following the declaration of war, Mirren felt as if the whole of the dale was cranking itself up for a fight. Boys from the grammar school suddenly appeared in uniform, parading themselves proudly in blue, navy and khaki. Jack went into the Royal Engineers. Uncle Wesley’s Bert joined the RAF, and his brother, Ben, came to work with Uncle Tom. It was good to have him around and he lodged with Uncle Tom at Scar Head.

How Auntie Florrie sobbed when Jack left the farm. For all his wild gadding about he was good to her, fetching errands from town, teasing her rotten when she tried a new hairdo, playing tricks to get her flustered. Who could ignore Jack when he was so suntanned and bronzed from haytiming, making the most of his last few days on the farm helping Uncle Tom?

They’d spread picnics in the fields for everyone
and held a hop in the barn as a farewell party for Lorna’s brother, Freddy, and Jack’s friends from Windebank. The fiddler kept them dancing over the stone flags until dawn.

Mirren felt so grown up in her checked dirndl skirt and voile blouse, and Jack had twirled her round and made a fuss of her.

Mirren wasn’t going to be left behind teaching, and volunteered for the Women’s Land Army. She was based at the unit down in Scarperton but got a dispensation to work at Cragside in the place of young Derek Sumner, the farm lad who’d disappeared one night to join the navy.

Grandpa Joe, in his fustian breeches and outdoor clogs, was eighty, still upright and fit enough, but his rheumatics got to his back in damp weather. Grandma Adey had shrunk to nothing but had a will of iron when it came to keeping the farmhouse stocked and sparkling. With Tom and Ben’s muscle they made a good team.

Suddenly farming was on a wartime footing with the War-Ag Ministry breathing down their necks, inspecting fields, ordering quotas, issuing demands for extra yields in all their food production.

The Yewells paced over their bottom fields with heavy hearts, knowing some of their best pastures must be ploughed over and sown for oats, barley, kale and root crops.

‘It’s a waste of time,’ said Joe, shaking his head
in disgust. ‘This land isn’t meant to grow arable. They’ll not get owt off it, you’ll see. Who’s going to plough it over?’

‘I am,’ Mirren piped up. ‘We’re bringing over a tractor tomorrow, just the job; I’ve been practising on it for days. I’ll have those furrows as straight as tramlines.’ They all looked at her as if she was mad. Ploughing was man’s work but she’d show them!

The past weeks of training were taken up with lectures and demonstrations, visits from advisors round the farm giving out orders. The villagers were busy extending their allotments and hen coops, pig arks sprouted in back gardens. Florrie and Adey were sewing up blackout curtains, grumbling that no one could possibly see into their small windows until the ARP warden told them that torchlight could be seen from the air and they must cover every opening.

Granny cursed old Josiah Yewell for building such fancy front windows for show. Ben boarded them up with wooden shutters and the house felt dark and gloomy.

‘We’ll never hear any sirens or whistles up here,’ Florrie wittered every time she came to visit. ‘We’ll be taken in our beds!’

‘Happen the cellar or under the stairs will have to do the job for us. There’s always the big rock hole in the field to jump behind,’ teased Mirren.

‘And get ourselves shot trying to run across the grass?’ Florrie snapped. ‘You can’t go anywhere off the track. There’s tanks and shooting ranges on the moors. It’s not safe to wander too far out. They’ll be roasting our sheep if we don’t watch out.’

‘We’ll all be roasting our sheep if they get a broken leg,’ winked Uncle Tom, quoting the new regulations that did allow lame sheep to be slaughtered as food.

There was a big searchlight being built at the back of Windebank looking down over the valley, hoping to catch night raiders taking a short cut across Yorkshire.

The village seemed full of strangers; children evacuated from Leeds and Bradford billeted around the green, climbing trees and splashing in the beck. The Fleece was packed with soldiers off duty from the moor, according to Uncle Tom and Ben, squeezing locals from their benches by the fire.

Not that Mirren went anywhere near, being strictly teetotal. She’d never forgotten what drink had done to her father. It was like pissing away hard-earned brass to her, but it was supposed to warm chilled bones and some of the strangers weren’t used to the sharp damp air yet.

On the morning of their turn to use the Fordson tractor, she crawled up the narrow lanes, praying no cart would be coming in the opposite direction
or that the gateposts weren’t too narrow. Some of the girls had had to demolish posts before they could get through to do their work. She felt like a queen on her chariot, smart in her fawn corduroy breeches, green jersey and turban, riding high overlooking the stone walls with her instructor, Reggie Pilling, who could plough blindfold, backwards, without a wobble.

She was going to show those Yewell men just what a hot shot she’d become, but her heart sank when she saw them all lined up waiting for her to crunch the gear box and stall the engine.

With her chin stuck out, her eyes glued to the task ahead, she didn’t want lanky Ben smirking or Uncle Tom making silly faces. Tractors were rare treasures in this part of the dale and everyone would want a go when she was finished. Grandpa Joe waved her on, shaking his head. Ben was all for horses, not machines. Hercules and Hector were his finest Clydesdales. He would be hard to impress.

‘We’ll do Honey Mires first and then Stubbins and then Top Meadow,’ said Reggie, looking at his papers. ‘They’ll be sown down to oats.’

‘Will they grow this high up?’ Mirren asked, knowing how cold and wet it could get even in summer.

‘That’s what the War-Ag have decided. Only time’ll tell if it works. Doesn’t have to be top quality;
it’s only for cattle feed. Oats have been the staple diet up here for centuries,’ he added, seeing the look of scorn on her face.

‘Yes, but this is sheep country, not arable.’

‘Don’t argue, lass. Ours is not to reason why,’ he laughed. ‘Just get on with it! You’ve got an audience.’

Mirren set off determined to keep a straight line, up and down without a hitch, turning the pasture brown side up, the meadow where clover and rattle, buttercups and rich grasses scented the air in June. All those wild flowers ploughed in. It was a good field for keeping bees. The loam was rich and moist, and weeds would sprout with the oats. It would be her job to weed and keep an eye on the crop until the stalks were ripened off.

Up and down she trundled, hoping everyone had got on with their own jobs by now, but just as she was turning round the bottom end a blackened-up face leaped up and screeched, ‘Geronimo!’

It was Jack, back on leave, up to his old tricks, giving her a surprise, scaring her witless, making her laugh and lose concentration. She wobbled and her line went to pieces.

‘Firm up!’ yelled Reggie, not amused. ‘Get that bugger out of the way!’ The giggles had got hold of her and she was all over the place, seeing Jack clowning around.

‘Now look what you’ve made me do!’ she yelled
at the dashing young soldier. ‘Just wait till I see you proper. Don’t you know there’s a war on…?’

She wasn’t going to stop, even for him. This was her war work and she mustn’t shirk. He’d ruined her line but there was always the next.

Jack always made her laugh and her heart flutter. Mad Jack, the demon biker who drove Florrie wild when he brought his engines into the kitchen and spread them all over the floor, who roared round the narrow lanes as if it were Brooklands race track. He never seemed to take anything seriously. Uncle Tom had hoped he’d take to farming but not a chance.

‘What do you expect?’ Granny sniffed. ‘Florrie was a Kerr before she wed Wilf Sowerby Kerrs don’t make good farmers, not bred in the bone. He’ll do fine for hisself as long as he keeps moving. They like to wander, do Kerrs, allus have and allus will.’

So how come Florrie had stayed put with Uncle Tom? Mirren thought. She was always good for a laugh and could bake better than any Yewell.

Jack had stayed on at the boys’ grammar school, as she had at the girls’. He’d even been abroad to France on a school trip. He could speak real French while she struggled with Latin and German.

Now he was training down London way, something to do with mines. He’d always looked out for her like a big brother should but they weren’t
related in any way. The girls had drooled over him when he met her off the school bus and gave her a lift. How could she admit to them how much she looked forward to having him to herself? The sun came out when he came around.

It was something to do with him rescuing her when she was little, laughing her out of her sulks with his antics. You never knew what Jack would do next, and he was a great ballroom dancer, lifting her off her feet at the end of a dance. Sometimes he looked at her and made her blush.

‘You’re special, Mirren. Don’t you forget it. I shall have to keep my eye on you.’

Sometimes he took her out to the cinema and held her hand, other times he just left her alone. Lately he’d made her feel a right country bumpkin and she wondered if he was mooning over some flighty London piece with lipstick and kiss curls. If Lorna or Hilda ever tried flirting with him she felt jealousy flash through her body. That’s when she knew she was smitten. He made them all feel so girly and giggly, with his dancing black eyes. Cragside wasn’t the same when he went away. Florrie took her aside once when she saw how upset she was getting.

‘I can see how you feel about our Jack but don’t let him see it too much. He’s like my dad and doesn’t like to be cornered. Leave him be and he’ll come to. He’s not one for settling down, love, but
if ever he did, you’d be the one. He’s got a tender spot for you.’